The Biofuels Deception by Okbazghi Yohannes

Author:Okbazghi Yohannes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2018-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

4

The Three Deceptions: Abundance, Green Environment, and Blue Skies

Global oligopolies and their supporters have manufactured a series of myths and falsehoods to promote GE crops and biofuels as the long-awaited answers to the world’s problems of hunger, climate change, and energy shortages. Petroleum price hikes and the diversion of food crops to biofuel production during the 2007–2008 financial crisis triggered global food price surges, thereby throwing at least 100 million people into destitution, hunger, and malnutrition. In 2007 alone, consumers living in developing countries were subjected to an increase in the international prices of maize, rice, and wheat, which led to a record spending of $400 billion on food imports by developing countries.1 According to the World Bank, the prices for crops that are used to produce biofuels rose faster than other foods between 2006 and 2007, with the prices for grains going up 144 percent and for oilseeds 157 percent, while the prices for other food prices went up only 11 percent. These price hikes were in response to the fact that three-quarters of the increase in global maize production between 2006 and 2008 went to ethanol production; the five million hectares of cropland that could have been used to grow wheat were devoted to rapeseed and sunflowers feedstock for biodiesel production.2

The integration of industrial agriculture into the petroleum industry has made matters worse. Even though inorganic nitrogen is abundant in the atmosphere, it must be transformed into assimilable reactive nitrogen for plants to use it as fertilizer. The conversion process requires massive amounts of fossil resources, particularly natural gas and coal. So, as the price for fossil energy goes up, so does the price for fertilizer, raising the production costs of all crops. Because of the correlation between synthetic fertilizer prices and fossil price fluctuations, the global food market becomes volatile. Between 2006 and 2008, in response to soaring energy prices, the international price of synthetic fertilizer increased by 170 percent.3 The unprecedented global oil price increase raised the price of synthetic fertilizers and agrochemicals, and consequently the prices of agricultural commodities. In the United States, the price of synthetic fertilizers skyrocketed 160 percent in the first two months of 2008 compared with the same period in the previous year. The soaring oil price increase was made even worse when the biofuel companies diverted 93 million metric tons of American corn, wheat, and soybeans to biofuel production in 2007, twice the 2005 amounts. This represented more than half of the growth in American corn production during that period.4 Similar developments had taken place in the EU countries, Brazil, Japan, and China. In all, between 2000 and 2007, global ethanol production increased by threefold and biodiesel production by tenfold, reaching 62 billion liters and 10 billion liters, respectively. Worldwide, 295 million tons of grain were diverted to biofuel production in 2006 alone, representing 17 percent of world total grain production.5 The cumulative result of the conversion of grains to biofuels was that developing countries had to pay more for cereal imports, without necessarily increasing the volume of basic grains they imported.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.